Last year, my school adopted a new scripted social-emotional learning curriculum that we walk through with our advisories about once a week.
It is awful.
The topics are so important. The delivery is SO lame. And so most of our time is spent in eye-rolling rather than discussing or reflecting or learning together.
My experience of SEL in schools has been that truly fascinating, crucial content about cognition and the ways our brains work and what we can do to regulate our emotions is dumbed down for a student audience to the point that they disengage from it completely.
But when my eighth graders started studying Hamlet, I realized they were hungry for this stuff. They were interested academically, and they needed it personally. You see, in our TikTok era, teens have been turning to social media to diagnose their own mental health. They are searching for more; literature can be a way to give it to them.
So, the goals of this unit plan are simple:
Teach students the basics of mental health awareness — including a definition of mental health, naming emotions, and strategies for positive emotional management
Build on and deepen students’ skills in character analysis through a mental health lens
Prepare for transfer to help students consider their own mental health by first studying the mental health of fictional characters
This isn’t a traditional, linear unit plan. While you certainly could use it altogether and straight through with a single text, I envision it more as being a way to think about texts and view characters over the course of time.
In the unit plan doc, I’m sharing resources for three mini-lessons, five handouts for activities that could be used with any text, and four brand new reading response categories. Here are a few ideas for how you might use this:
Toss this into your independent reading and let students start practicing these skills there. Use the activities and/or reading response categories to help focus and anchor their thinking periodically.
Focus a round of literature circles or literary salons on the mental health of characters! The activities and reading responses can be used in small groups or individually as kindling for conversation.
Study a whole class text together through the lens of mental health.